Yahoo acquires news reading iPhone app Summly

Yahoo is the new owner of news-reading iPhone app Summly, the companies announced Monday. Founder Nick D’Aloisio and his team will join Yahoo, and the company will close the app.

In its official announcement of the acquisition, Yahoo says that ”Nick and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, you will see the technology come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon.”

Summly, which was founded by D’Aloisio at the age of 15 (he’s now 17), was an iOS app that offered up short summaries of news stories for reading on the go. Reviewing the app last year, Om Malik wrote that it was “simple, initiative, fast, clean and extremely well designed” — though he wasn’t sure it provided enough “constant craving and gratification” to entice him to return to it several times a day.

In an announcement posted at Summly, D’Aloisio writes, “We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products — see this as a ‘power nap’ so to speak. With over 90 million summaries read in just a few short months, this is just the beginning for our technology.”